~ Living the Slow life in North Carolina

Which came first, the rooster or the egg?

Just got back from the City Council meeting, where a lot of people, including my bud Anne-Marie and Billy the Blogging Poet, spoke on behalf of a revised ordinance to lessen the restrictions on setbacks to keep chickens and beehives in the city limits. It also put into place some reasonable restrictions that weren’t in the original ordinance, such as fencing and a no rooster rule. I sort of expected that the foodie homesteady kind of urban citizens would step up, but what surprised me was the lack of serious opposition and the willingness of the City Council to go even further in amending the ordinance to grandfather in people who were already raising chickens and roosters and bees.

Billy brilliantly brought up his chicken tractor, which no one had mentioned as an alternative to a stationary coop, and Mike Barber took particular interest in that.

Dianne Bellamy-Small raised herself in my esteem considerably tonight. She and Trudy Wade and seemingly everyone else were interested in saving the roosters already in place. But, as Trudy said, how do you tell whether the rooster was already there prior to tonight’s vote? A variation on an age-old philosophical question that no one still has an answer for.

The whole she-bang proved once again that food issues are and should be non-partisan.

And I gotta tell you, if roosters are banned, I can live with that, but the noise from little bored yappy dogs is just as annoying to some people as roosters crowing are to others. Where do you draw the line? If noise bothers you that much, you should probably either live WAY out in the country or do what I do: wear ear plugs.